“Britain’s Hardest Grafter,” an upcoming BBC program, targets the poor and shows the depths to which the broadcaster has sunk, social realist filmmaker and activist Ken Loach has warned.

The show has been
condemned as a cross between Channel 4 “poverty porn”
outing Benefits Street and the dystopian action series The Hunger
Games, in which the desperate are pitted against each other by a
totalitarian regime.

Loach told the Morning Star: “It’s fascist TV where poverty
is seen as entertainment.”

He railed against the idea of “BBC programs targeting the
poorest people.”

“It shows the depths to which our public sector has
sunk,” he said.

Some 24,000 people have now signed a petition calling for the
show to be dropped, and a newly elected Labour MP has also joined
the debate.

In a Huffington Post blog, Louise Haigh MP wrote: “I am
uneasy about middle-class BBC executives finally giving up on any
pretense they serve the public interest and instead rushing to
become part of a steady demonization of working-class
people.”

“There’s a nastiness about programs that seek to divide
people into the deserving and undeserving poor.”

Participants will be a mixture of underemployed, unemployed and
minimum wage workers who will be required to compete over the
course of the series, with the least effective workers eliminated
each week.

“This is the next rung down the ladder in the disturbing
trend of voyeuristic ‘poverty porn’ made popular in programs like
‘Benefits Street,’” the petition reads.

“Unemployment and poverty are serious social issues and
should not be the subject of a cheap game show format, designed
to exploit some of the most impoverished in our society for the
purposes of dubious ‘entertainment.’

“Not even the cheapest and tackiest of the cable or satellite
channels have stooped to this level. We believe a higher standard
should be expected from the BBC, a national broadcaster that is
funded by public subscription in the form of the license
fee.”

In a joint statement released when the petition began the BBC and
Twenty Twenty, the film company involved, said “Britain’s
Hardest Grafter is a serious social experiment for BBC2 which
investigates just how hard people in the low wage economy
work.

“Each week the contributors – who are all in work or actively
looking – will experience a different ‘blue collar’ role as the
series explores the truth about Britain’s work ethic. Throughout
the series, the contributors are rewarded for the work they
do.”